Ironing out bowlers' quirks is a short cut to the treatment table

This afternoon Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo will tee off in the first round of the Open at Royal Liverpool. The pair are not on speaking terms, the result of Faldo's critical comments on American television of the changes Woods has made to his swing. Woods doesn't like criticism in any form, but from Faldo, a golfer so self-absorbed when in his prime that he didn't speak to his playing partner in a Ryder Cup match, it appears to have created an antipathy over and above the Woods benchmark, which has hitherto been measured in Mickelsons.

At least Faldo speaks from experience, having performed major surgery on his already formidable game under the coach David Leadbetter (whom - nice touch - he was later to fire by fax) in pursuit of the ultimate repeating golf swing - one that was totally reliable under pressure. For a while, culminating in his surgical destruction of Greg Norman in the 1996 Masters, it worked magnificently. Even now it is lack of length off the tee, an iffy putter and age, rather than a breakdown in his method, that places him so firmly in the past.

It took several years, patience, a massive work ethic and thousands of balls struck on the range before the transformation was complete and there must have been many moments when Faldo, in pressure situations before everything became instinctive, might have felt an inclination to go back to the tried and tested method. To resist such temptation would require huge trust in his new method and self-confidence.

It is always to Faldo that my thoughts turn when I hear that a young bowler has been remodelling his action. To my mind there is a direct correlation between the essentials of the golf swing and bowling action, in that both work best if they become mechanical. Glenn McGrath could hit his length and line with his eyes shut. His action, grooved and fine-tuned over the years, means that both fundamental disciplines are a given, allowing him to concentrate on strategy. When the chips are down, his captain can call on him knowing that his method will stand up to scrutiny unlike, say, Kabir Ali, who became so exposed when under the cosh during the one-day series against Sri Lanka that he crumbled visibly until there was nothing left to do but bowl and hope.

Currently, there appears to be a move led by biomechanists to standardise a one-size-fits-all bowling action. Let's call it the Plunkett, the sort of thing you purchase flatpacked and assemble yourself. It contains, so they say, all the elements that allow a pace bowler to ply his trade with minimum risk to his health. This, to me, is simplistic and makes no allowance for personal quirks which in many cases are what elevate a player above the pack.

Forty years or so ago, the brilliant guitarist Davy Graham went to live in Morocco, where as a result of listening to the oud, a sort of precursor to the lute, he devised a modal guitar tuning, known as DADGAD (the open note for each string), which revolutionised the playing of British and especially Celtic folk music. Keith Richards,however, uses an open G tuning (DGDGBD since you ask) and removes the bottom string. There are many ways of getting a tune out of what is essentially the same instrument. Bowling coaches who interfere as a kind of job-justification might do well to remember that.

What concerns me about the idea of changing - as opposed to tinkering with - actions is the potential not so much to eliminate injury as to coach it in. Go to any junior coaching session and see how actions with the idiosyncrasies are already formed. Try to change even a small part of that later and the chaos theory can apply down the whole chain of muscles and joints.

I don't believe either that I'd heard of an ankle impingement in a bowler until recently when McGrath, then Simon Jones and finally Andrew Flintoff had surgery. Perhaps it went by another name, but I happen to think that in instructing bowlers, such as Liam Plunkett, to land their back foot facing forward down the pitch, rather than parallel to the crease as of yore, the supposed easing of the strain on the back is offset by the potential of creating this flex-induced condition instead.

I wouldn't put my house on it but if Plunkett does not get ankle trouble in the future I would be very surprised. It took Faldo years to get it right. Cricketers don't have that time.